A striking and powerful documentary overview of the populist protests that rocked Iran in June 2009 and helped spark the Arab Spring movement, The Green Wave serves as an inventive registering of terrible turmoil, upheaval and governmental crackdown. Working with animator Ali Reza Darvish, director Ali Samadi Ahadi weaves together recreated blog postings and eyewitness accounts with interviews of prominent human rights activists and Iranian exiles, and in the process achieves something fairly remarkable — a record not only factual but equally emotional, capturing the electric sweep of feeling, and commingled hope and despair of the younger generation in Iran and, indeed, throughout much of the Middle East.



In the wake of what was widely regarded as a rigged presidential election victory by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over progressive candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, democratic demonstrations and protests overwhelmed the streets of Tehran. This was notable as something never before seen in the Middle East. Citizens in many other countries, both Muslim and secular, took note. Revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have since then toppled regimes, and civil war continues in Syria. Other countries — Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan and Oman, to name a few — also saw massive protests.

Iran, however, was and remains of special interest. In the news as a pariah because of its nuclear program, the populist uprising put an international face on the average Iranian, showing a desire on their part for fairer social policies, more governmental transparency, and arguably a greater and more conciliatory engagement with the world community. The Ahmadinejad regime’s brutal crackdown — with the certain blessing of the ruling mullahs — unleashed a band of knife- and club-wielding thugs on motorcycles, who roamed city streets beating men, women and children alike. Many more green-clad activists were arrested, and then beaten and/or raped, decried as treasonous “non-believers.”

The Green Wave documents this government-sanctioned brutality and murder, in a manner not unlike Israeli filmmaker Ali Folman’s 2008 Waltz With Bashir, which depicted refracted memories of his experience as a solider in the 1982 Lebanon War. It dramatizes, but also contextualizes and universalizes, with the animated segments and various textual social media updates serving as an artful counterbalance to the pulse-quickening cell phone videos (some graphic) of panicked demonstrators fleeing the wrath of their countrymen.

If there are criticisms, it’s that The Green Wave could benefit from a bit more surgical precision in its exposition and timeline of events and, at only 80 minutes, could also afford to plumb a bit deeper, either via updating the struggle in Iran or — perhaps more dangerously — attempting to rope in voices of hard-line law and order. Still, The Green Wave is an impactful snapshot of the human yearning for dignity and freedom. It serves as a reminder, as one interviewee stresses, that despotic regimes in power today may not be in power tomorrow, and that public records like this — unthinkable a generation ago — will serve as an important first draft of history of their crimes. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Green Wave is also available on VOD and via crowd-sourced screenings; for more information, click here. (Red Flag Releasing, unrated, 80 minutes)

A hopelessly broad and undisciplined comedy that features a small handful of amusing ideas but otherwise evinces no great effort or intelligence, The Campaign represents a major missed opportunity for rich Stateside election year satire. Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis each exercise their well-toned individual comedic chops, but director Jay Roach’s movie feels to its very core vague and scared of offending anyone, and therefore has trouble connecting in any meaningful way, no matter the heightened absurdity of its backdrop.

Loads of small narrative missteps and false details also add up. They make for a movie that feels generic and toothless instead of plugged in and alive. Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell’s script aims for big targets, grabbing a couple story beats from political scandals of the last several years, but it never roots down into the foibles of party politics. Instead, it opts to track swings in public opinion for the two candidates through polling response to exaggerated events, as with an uptick for Huggins related to an “accidental” hunting shooting. Unintentionally, this says a lot about the filmmakers’ regard for their audience. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 86 minutes)

In 2009, Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s Bananas!* was just one of more than a dozen nonfiction competition entries in the Los Angeles Film Festival — the story of a (successful) lawsuit that a dozen Nicaraguan plantation workers had brought against the Dole Corporation, alleging sterility and other health problems brought about by continued and knowing exposure to illegal pesticides. But the movie itself became a story when, in the weeks leading up to its festival premiere, Dole started flexing its corporate might, and tossed out a steady stream of lawsuit threats left and right if the movie was shown in its present form — owing largely to an investigation of the lawyer working on behalf of the plaintiffs. The Los Angeles Film Festival backed down, screening the movie out of competition, at a separate venue, and under the legal protection of a nicely phrased statement of dissociation.



The Sundance Film Festival-minted Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, then (and yes, the asterix are part of the respective titles), is Gertten’s adjunct offering/follow-up, sort of akin to Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams or, more to the point, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha. It’s a lifted-curtain story of what went on behind-the-scenes during the attempted production/mounting/release of another work of art. It’s also a pretty compelling story about freedom of speech, and how in a worldwide economy and digital age companies are even more apt to take aggressive, proactive and even punitive measures to squelch voices and stories — true or false not really mattering — that can negatively impact their bottom lines. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Big Boys Gone Bananas!* opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena; for more information about the movie, visit its website by clicking here. (WG Films, unrated, 86 minutes)

A compelling documentary that explodes proper and stuffy notions of what a foreign intellectual dissident looks and sounds like, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry offers up a comprehensive snapshot of one of China’s most celebrated contemporary artists, as well as one of its most outspoken critics.



A raconteur to his core, 54-year-old Ai Weiwei is a painter, filmmaker and multimedia artist who has incorporated elements of Andy Warhol’s “factory” approach into his art. After having helped design his country’s iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, Ai in 2011 became China’s most famous missing person, held in police custody for three months on tax charges and other issues after publicly denouncing the Olympic Games as party propaganda. As an avid Twitterer, Ai drew attention abroad for this sort of commentary, as well as his advocacy on behalf of the more than 5,400 schoolchildren who died as a result of shoddy government construction in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

As directed by Alison Klayman, Never Sorry effectively walks a razor’s edge between a work of serious sociological inquiry and a somewhat cheeky portrait of a guy whose favorite mode of expression may well be an extended middle finger. Klayman approaches Ai’s private life somewhat gingerly, and with good reason. Though the artist asserts his mother and family life are “not representational” of who he is, it’s clear the truth is a bit more complicated — as evidenced both by the fact that his father, a poet, was denounced by the Anti-Rightist Movement and in 1958 sent to a forced labor camp, but especially the fact that during the course of the movie Ai fathers a son by a woman other than his longtime wife, fellow artist Lu Qing, with whom he shares no children.

Ai, who for a dozen years studied and lived in the United States, seems understandably influenced by his time in the West, but not always in the most direct manner that one might expect. Transparency and accountability inform much of his political agitation, rather than some desire for more naked democratic upheaval. Undertaking projects to cast a light on government deceit and cover-up in the wake of the aforementioned earthquake obviously bring him much scrutiny. And when he confronts a police officer following him the evening before Ai is to testify in the trial of a colleague accused of “inciting subversion of state power,” the officer pacifies his wounded pride by having Ai disturbed during the middle of the night. An assault occurs (off camera), and portions of the rest of the film detail the artist’s filing of various paperwork of formal protest and investigation.

Never Sorry is much enlivened by its lively subject, but it is also an ample, interesting and ruminative showcase on China as a society in flux, simply filtered through the prism of this one man. Creativity and freedom go hand in hand, so the government’s attempts to foster and promote the former while still considerably constraining the latter prove problematic. Nearly 25 years after the tinderbox of the Tiananmen Square protest and subsequent crackdown, there are still faultlines evident. When they will rupture again one cannot say, but Klayman’s movie confirms and captures the currents of change. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 91 minutes)